Even the most well-prepared GRE student can expect to feel a little anxiety on test day. After all, the GRE can have a significant effect on your admission to graduate school. Nevertheless, too much GRE anxiety has the potential to cloud your focus and diminish your test-day performance. If you are someone who tends to stress about your GRE score or feel anxious while taking the GRE, we have a number of simple and effective strategies to help you eliminate GRE test anxiety and perform at your best.

In this article, we’ll discuss the following topics:

First, let’s take a look at some typical signs of test-day anxiety.


Test-day anxiety can affect the body and mind in many different ways. Some common symptoms include:

• Your heart rate is faster than usual.
• Your breathing is faster than usual.
• You feel lightheaded, faint, or dizzy.
• You’re sweating.
• You have dry mouth.
• You have cramps.
• You feel tense.
• Your concentration level is poor.
• Your mind feels blank while taking the test.
• Your thoughts are racing and unfocused.
• You’re worried about how you’re performing.
• You read and reread the questions, but you can’t seem to figure out what they’re asking.
• You reflect on the questions after the fact and know that you had the ability to correctly answer them, although you couldn’t solve them in the moment.

If you’ve experienced any of these symptoms while taking the GRE, taking a GRE practice exam, or thinking about your upcoming GRE, you likely were experiencing test anxiety. Specifically, your fight-or-flight response may have kicked in.


A little anxiety is a normal physiological response to situations that may present danger and thus require a heightened state of alertness. Anxiety increases our awareness, processing skills, and visual and auditory sensations. However, as our level of anxiety increases, we can see a steep drop in higher-order thinking — the exact type of thinking necessary to perform well on the GRE. This drop in cognitive performance is due to the fight-or-flight response.

The fight-or-flight response physiologically prepares us to either fight a threat or flee from it. Pupils dilate to enhance our vision, digestion shuts off (no time to eat while running from a bear), glucose and stress-hormone levels rise to provide energy to our muscles, and blood travels from brain regions that focus on higher-level thought, readying the muscles, lungs, and heart for a physical confrontation.

This evolutionary adaptation came in very handy in the distant past, when frequent encounters with large animals or rival clans could be deadly, but the fight-or-flight response is often not appropriate in our modern lives. If you’ve ever been angry and snapped at someone only to quickly regret your outburst, your fight-or-flight response may be partially to blame. The fight-or-flight response is triggered in seconds, but its effects last well beyond the point at which a perceived threat has disappeared.

If your anxiety level is too high when taking the GRE, your fight-or-flight response could kick in and make it difficult to concentrate on the question in front of you. Blood is leaving part of your brain to be available to your muscles. Unfortunately, you can’t reason through an algebra problem with your quadriceps. Those can help you land a roundhouse kick on an enemy, but they’re not very useful for setting up an equation. Aside from, of course, mastering GRE content, a key way to earn your highest possible GRE score is to minimize exam-related stress and mitigate any anxiety that pops up on test day. Fortunately, there are plenty of practical, actionable strategies that any GRE student can follow to decrease test anxiety and earn a higher score.


Consider a 40-question test on basic division and multiplication. Would taking that test make you very nervous? Most people are comfortable with basic calculations because they’ve been practicing division and multiplication for many years. Now, change those 40 math questions to ones involving roots and exponents, shaded regions, probability, and number properties, and suddenly people start to get nervous.

They know that they’re not as strong with those concepts. Their bodies know this, too, and their bodies are telling them that this test is an important one and they may not be prepared to handle the challenge. Sounds pretty stressful! The most obvious yet overlooked strategy to combat GRE stress is — you guessed it — knowing the material like the back of your hand. In other words, prepare, prepare, prepare! After you’ve prepared enough, prepare some more. Prepare to the point that the material is no longer a source of stress.

Don’t just practice until you can get questions right; practice until you can’t get them wrong. Once you have the confidence of knowing that you are well-prepared for the GRE, rather than provoking anxiety, the test may actually become enjoyable for you. After all, you’ll be able to put all of your hard work to good use and show the GRE who’s boss! Just as you must be as comfortable as possible with GRE content in order to reduce test-day anxiety, you must be comfortable with the experience of taking the GRE. Achieving such comfort requires practice.


There is a saying in sports that “you won’t play any better than you practice.” In other words, if you take a casual approach to your training, you can’t expect to do well on game day. If a boxer builds great technique and stamina on the heavy bag but never gets in the ring to spar, how well can fight night go? The same idea can be applied to the GRE. Some students do plenty of preparation with GRE material but fail to take enough practice tests before the real deal. This is a bankrupt strategy.

One of the best ways to reduce GRE stress is to take (and review) all four official ETS practice tests before your actual GRE. Doing so allows you to build familiarity and comfort with the GRE that you can’t get from simply completing problem sets or untimed practice. When you take several full-length practice exams under realistic testing conditions, you desensitize yourself to the process of taking the GRE and, to a significant degree, make the real GRE feel like just another practice test.

A former GRE student of mine told me that his test center was so cold that he needed to wear his coat while taking his GRE. On top of that, he had slept poorly the night before. Yet, as someone who began his GRE journey with little confidence in his test-taking skills and thus had taken all available practice exams, he realized that this day was not so different from others when he had woken up, eaten breakfast, and taken a practice GRE. So, in spite of issues that he might have responded to by becoming anxious, he maintained his composure and exceeded his score goal.

Of course, there are only so many practice exams you can take, and you want to ensure that you use GRE practice tests strategically, at the right point in your prep. Luckily, there are other things that you can do at any time to mentally prepare yourself for what it may be like to take the GRE.


Exposure therapy involves changing fear and anxiety responses by putting a person in a scenario that elicits those responses, so the person ultimately can become more comfortable. For example, someone who is afraid of heights would spend time in high places learning to manage that response. Interestingly, simply visualizing being in a situation that triggers a fear response is enough to catalyze that response. So, you can learn to stay calm while taking the GRE by visualize yourself taking the GRE, feeling any anxious responses that arise, and practicing managing those feelings. If you know that when you think of the exam, career-related pressures trigger worries and anxiety in you, you could imagine that you are taking the exam, feel that pressure, and practice acknowledging that feeling without letting it snowball into anxiety.

If you tend to agonize over how well you’re performing as you progress through GRE questions, distracting yourself by trying to figure out what certain questions “mean” about your score, you could imagine getting an easy question and wondering whether that is an indication that you didn’t correctly answer the previous question. How do you respond to that situation? How would you like to respond? You can take this type of “soft” exposure therapy to a fairly sophisticated level, for instance, by looking at photographs of testing center interiors. A quick Google image search brings up many such photos. How do you respond to seeing a test center? How would you like to respond? Imagine yourself there and practice managing your response. You could even drive to your test center a few times. During the drive, practice feeling energized, confident, and prepared to take your exam. Get yourself accustomed to handling the situations that typically provoke anxiety in you, until they no longer do.

As you practice this exposure therapy, don’t seek to repress your anxiety; rather, notice your response to stress and sit with those feelings until you calm down. Consider alternative ideas, for instance, that becoming anxious about your career doesn’t do you any good. Can you talk yourself out of becoming anxious? Essentially, yes, you can. Let’s look at another type of visualization (perhaps the most important type) to reduce test anxiety: visualizing success.


Many top professional athletes use visualization to gain a game-day edge. The human brain is an incredible machine, and we often underestimate the role that our patterns of thought play in our performance. Your thoughts become your actions, and your actions become your outcomes. We know that preparation and practice are vital, but if you don’t believe in your capacity to succeed, you may sabotage yourself before you even have the opportunity to put your skills to the test.

You have a choice about what you think. If you believe that you can’t lose, you’re all but guaranteed to do your best. You must visualize yourself triumphing over the GRE, correctly answering questions on test day and earning a high score. You must see it and believe it.